Android app, give day a number

Question

Right I'm very noobie when it comes to Android, I have built a couple of basic applications but nothing major.

What I'm trying to do is create a quote of the day application where by when you load up the application it displays a quote (listed in a string) depending on what day of the year it is.

I have the main code for displaying a quote from a string done. and this works and I can select which quote to show by changing entries in the code or I have written some code to display the quote at random.

The next step is to display a quote depending on the date. For this to happen I'm guessing I need to utilized the built in clock/calendar of the phone. this is where i come unstuck. I have create the local variable daynumber but this has to be populated somehow pulling the number from the clock.

My questions are these:

1 Am I going about this the right way. Have I got the logic right.

2 If not how would I do this

3 How would I get the phone to pull the day of the year and interpret this.

In short what I'm basically asking for is to turn a year into 365 days 1 is jan 1st, 2 is jan 2nd, 365 is dec 31st

Here is the code I have :

package com.quote.app;

import java.util.Random;

import android.os.Bundle;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.content.res.Resources;
import android.view.Menu;
import android.widget.TextView;

public class MainActivity extends Activity {

    /** Called when the activity is first created. */

    private String[] myString;
    private static final Random rgenerator = new Random();

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
        Resources res = getResources();

        myString = res.getStringArray(R.array.myArray); 

        String q = myString[daynumber];

        TextView tv = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text1);
        tv.setText(q);
    }
}

Answer 1

Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
int day = calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_YEAR);

Answer 2

Have a look at the Calendar Class. You can get today's date with the following (taken from the reference linked)

Calendar rightNow = Calendar.getInstance()

You can also get the number for the current day (January 1st is 1, 2nd is 2 and so on).